It’s official, us mamas have forgotten how to relax.

Before kids, we were all pros at it—like gold medal-winning relaxers. We have fond memories of coming home from work and plopping our bodies down on the couch and not moving for hours-on-end. Sure, we’d pour ourselves a glass or two of wine, eat something delicious, and walk our dogs, but that was the extent of our nightly movement.

Yep.

Who was that person?

It’s almost like when our first-borns came, they took away any knowledge of how to take a night off and be calm and gave us saggy boobs and cellulite, and non-stop worry in exchange (so sweet!).

What do we do instead? Our minds decide to run sprints at 50 mph about everything.

And we work. Sprint.

We clean. Sprint.

We prepare for tomorrow. Sprint.

We do artwork prep.…oh, and does the baby have enough milk in the fridge? It’s more like WHAT DON’T WE DO OR THINK ABOUT?

And,

we never seem to finish the race we’re running.

But we can’t stop and take a full breath without thinking about the next thing,

and the next thing.

And those “things” would be eating away at us if we relaxed so we wouldn’t enjoy the peaceful moment, anyway.

So, we keep going.

And now, during this world-wide pandemic, there’s even more to do and to overthink.

And even though the rest of the world is on pause,

the life of a mother is full speed ahead at all times.

Running that race, we’ll never seem to finish.

But one day, our children will be out of the house

and we’ll have all the time in the world to relax.

No, the worry won’t stop,

but we’ll have to do far less for them.

We’ll sit in front of the television with no disruptions—

and we’ll miss our kids in the deafening silence.

And the phone will ring, and as soon as we pick up and hear their familiar voices

everything will feel right.

Because that’s when we'll finally realize,

that the race we never could complete

is ironically the most beautiful part of parenting:

we’re never finished.

This post originally appeared on the author's Facebook. Her book Living FULL: Winning My Battle with Eating Disorder is available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2O4mJId